wimax

The news out of small ILECs like TDS and Cincinnati Bell is that fiber to the home is selling well but more importantly is increasing retention and lowering churn. (Customer acquisition costs are very high in flat product segments like consumer broadband, cellular service and TV.)

Even Fairport, acquired by RLEC Consolidated, is upgrading its network for higher speeds. Some of this is due to the fact that cable is winning the broadband war.

The biggest jump over the weekend was Red Bull Stratos: "Felix Baumgartner captured the attention of the web on Sunday when he jumped from a capsule 128,000 feet above Earth and landed safely on the ground in New Mexico." [via Huffpro] Not only did Baumgartner break the speed of sound, but YouTube broke the streaming barrier previously set at the Olympics. 8M people watched globally as Baumgarter jumped from the stratosphere.

Another big jump was Japanese mobile operator, Softbank, plunking down $20.1 Billion for a 70% stake in Sprint. Sprint needed the cash to reverse its course in 4G build-out issues with WiMax and Clearwire.

In March, Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research announced that Sprint would end up in bankruptcy. MSN reports, "After assigning a 50% likelihood in March that Sprint would end up in bankruptcy as it raced to build a national wireless network to handle smartphones like the iPhone 5 and compete with stronger carriers -- and citing bond trading prices -- telecom sector bear Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research now says that readily available financing makes that prospect remote. However, amid a 100%-plus stock rise for Sprint in 2012, Moffett says that even if bankruptcy is not a near-term risk for Sprint shareholders, significant risks remain."

Bloomberg writes, "Sprint's stock surged 136 percent for the second-biggest gain in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index as the wireless provider boosted sales with Apple Inc.'s iPhone and began rolling out a faster network.

Just looking at the news makes me think that the cellular industry is having a week of mayhem. Besides the mess I wrote about earlier this week, "US wholesale player LightSquared has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid efforts to resolve regulatory issues that have prevented it from launching its satellite service," according to Telecoms. "The carrier has been planning to build a ground-based LTE network, supported by satellites, but the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blocked the project, stating that the proposed mobile broadband network will impact GPS services and that there is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference." That about spells it all out.

The screaming you hear is coming from execs at the global cellcos. For years we have been hearing how voice will be free. (Hasn't happened yet, but it has flat rated.) Now it seems the text messaging revenue arm is decreasing - 9% from last year globally.

According to this article, "Pinger and an explosion of smartphone messaging services -- like iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber Media, Facebook Messenger and KakaoTalk -- have managed in just a few years to slash away at the important revenue that cell phone companies get from text messaging.

It's a mobile Monday as I get set to pack up to head to ITEXPO East 2012 in Miami Beach.

Yahoo was being Yahoo! this morning as it announced - in the same breath - that it has launched a "Mobile First" mindset, then shut down 10 mobile apps. Granted, some of them were not doing well (like Yahoo itself), but it's schizophrenic to do it on the same day.